On paper Gangster Squad looks like a sure hit. In the LAPD’s take no prisoners war against gang leader Mickey Cohen, it has an interesting story. Its period setting and organized crime subject matter makes it very much a gangster movie, which is a genre that produces entertaining films, more often than not. And, more than any of that, it’s the third feature film from director Ruben Fleischer, who made the wildly entertaining Zombieland and the funny and underrated 30 Minutes or Less, and it boasts a cast of talented and accomplished actors like Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Michael Peña, Robert Patrick, Giovanni Ribisi, and Nick Nolte, among others. On paper Gangster Squad looks like it has so many things going for it that it should be a guaranteed success. Unfortunately, movie making is a craft that involves intangibles, and despite its dramatic subject matter and the impressive talent behind its creation, this one is never able to accomplish more than just being passable.
Before we get to why that is, let’s talk a bit more about Gangster Squad’s specifics. Mickey Cohen was a former prizefighter turned gangster who took over the virtually untouched L.A. crime scene throughout the 40s. By the time 1949 rolled around, he practically had control of the whole town, including its politicians, judges, and police force. Sensing that the window of opportunity to take Cohen down before he became all-powerful was coming to a close, a police chief played by Nick Nolte gives an honest and honorable cop played by Josh Brolin the orders to put together a squad of guys who will work off the books, disrupt Cohen’s operations, and take him down by any means necessary. This gangster squad won’t be carrying any badges, they won’t be answering to any superiors, and they won’t be following the letter of the law. The first recruit Brolin tries to land is a slick and clever cop with a taste for gambling and sleeping with Mickey Cohen’s girlfriend (Emma Stone) who’s played by Ryan Gosling. Things get bloody from there.
How bloody? The movie opens with Cohen chaining a guy to two cars and ordering him to be ripped in half. One of the most important things to understand about Gangster Squad is that it isn’t a well-researched account of what the fight against organized crime was like in 1940s Los Angeles. This isn’t a movie that’s concerned with history in the slightest. Instead, it’s a big, dumb action movie that happens to have a historical setting. This is important because we seem to have a desire for movies with a historical setting to reflect reality more so than we do movies set in the present. Nobody bats an eyelash at a tatted-up Dwayne Johnson jumping through explosions and dodging a thousand bullets in Fast 5, but put him in a trench coat and a fedora and suddenly the same would seem ridiculous. Well, Gangster Squad does have characters in trench coats and fedoras jumping through explosions and dodging a thousand bullets, and it is ridiculous, so if you’re going to enjoy the movie at all you’re going to have to be willing to accept the ridiculousness and just roll with it. The good news is, if you do, this isn’t an unwatchable movie at all.
The fists hit hard and hit fast during the fight scenes, an incomprehensible number of bullets haphazardly spray from tommy guns during the shootouts, Penn is menacing as the bad guy, Brolin is clean-cut as the good guy, and Gosling and Stone rekindle the chemistry they first showed in Crazy, Stupid, Love. There’s a lot of flashy stuff to be distracted by here. The problem is, the film is never able to do more than just distract. Its fights are the ridiculous sort where one guy takes on five with no problem. Its heroes get punched a hundred times without ever going down, they brave a volley of gunfire without getting so much as a graze. There aren’t any stakes to the action scenes because they don’t exist in any sort of reality, they’re purely fantastical, comic book stuff. If the good guys came up with a genius plan of action, if they found a way to outsmart the arrogant and powerful bad guys, then Gangster Squad could have been a lot more interesting and lot more exciting, but instead we’re just given protagonists who charge into every situation headfirst, without thinking, and we’re supposed to accept that their bullets are going to hit because they’re good and the bad guys’ bullets are going to miss because they’re bad. This is mindless escapism in its purest, emptiest form.
The main reason little here is able to resonate is that the writing just isn’t very good. What little plot we get is simple and bare bones, the drama that gets introduced is too melodramatic and telegraphed to be effective, and—worst of all—the dialogue is generic and on the nose. The reason the lame dialogue is the worst of this movie’s crimes is because Fleischer has put together one of the more charismatic casts that have been assembled in recent memory, and this script wastes them. Think of Sean Penn’s ambitious work in something like Milk, Brolin’s turn in No Country For Old Men, Gosling’s low-key but hypnotic performance in Drive, Michael Peña’s magnetism in End of Watch, and the mastery at playing a sympathetic protagonist Stone showed in The Help, and then get all of that stuff out of your head. Gangster Squad fails to give any of these actors anything interesting to say, anything interesting to do—they may as well just be mannequins place-holding in a crime movie diorama. Robert Patrick is the only one who comes out of the film having done anything memorable, and that’s just because he got to play a cowboy in a movie full of gangsters.
All of the blame shouldn’t be heaped on Will Beall’s script though, because Fleischer’s direction leaves a lot to be desired as well. Instead of paying homage to the noir films that come from the era in which this story was set, he chooses to give everything a stylized, modern presentation. This would be fine, except the style seems to be limited to tired, overdone tricks like showing bullets traveling in super slow-motion, or showing a zippo lighter being lit in super slow-motion. It’s all such a far cry from the fun and inventive kill count opening of Zombieland that it’s hard to believe that film was made by the same director as this one. Everything that Gangster Squad serves up is so standard, so by the book that the movie comes off looking like an afterthought, like a product that just got churned out so everyone involved could collect a paycheck. It’s got lame voice over narration that tells you what you’re supposed to be taking away from the story, it’s got a lame, Wayne’s World-inspired Mega Happy Ending, etc... A movie designed by committee to be consumed by the least exclusionary audience possible will probably end up being palatable to most, but it’s going to be too bland to delight anyone, and if we’re not trying to delight an audience, then what’s the point of the film industry existing in the first place? Watch Gangster Squad—fine—chances are you’re not going to hate it. But you’ll be struggling to remember if you ever even saw it when it comes out on home video six months from now.
